A Critical Review of SecondWife.com

Update: I took Secondwife.com for a test drive a year after writing this review

It’s been almost a year since I reviewed SecondWife.com. I took the site for a test drive again and I’m sad to say they have barely improved. Almost none of my recommendations have been implemented.

They still spend their time doing traditional TV interviews which is a huge fail because they are not in front of their target audience. Anecdotally, so many business owners say “traditional media does not move the needle.”

They are still not leveraging content marketing to grow their user base. No blogs. No guest posts. No podcast or Youtube guest appearances on relevant Muslim shows. Inactive youtube channels (they have two.)

The user-interface is still old-fashioned and clunky. Why haven’t they focused on a mobile-first user experience (e.g. Muzmatch?)

Account quality is still very poor. A significant percentage of accounts are incomplete and inactive. And unless you live in the UK, there will be very few viable accounts in your geographic location to choose from.

If you are in the U.K., secondwife.com is worth using. Otherwise, give it a pass.

The original article starts after this sentence.

Secondwife.com is an affordable, high-demand service that does what it says on the tin but their technical execution and user experience needs to be improved.

I first heard about secondwife.com a little over a year ago through one of my teachers.

I remember checking the site out but I didn’t sign up.

Over the past six months or so I’ve been seeing the founder, Azad Chaiwala’s beaming, bespectacled mug on several mainstream media outlets in the West.

I love how he handles questions from non-Muslim journalists on polygyny.

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User Experience

When you arrive on site you are greeted by this hero image and form.

After the sign-up process and completing your profile you end up with this:

1) They use usernames rather than real names for privacy, but you can pick a username that uses your real name.

2) Profile pictures are set to private by default and users can request to see your pictures.

3) My profile pictures are set to public.

4) This was worded deliberately. Keep in mind, I was reviewing the site so I wrote the profile in a way that would deter most women. I didn’t want any bints catching feels.

5) This is some great wordsmithing if I do say so myself. The punchline was ‘we get married, you pay your own way, and I split my time between both wives.’ One woman was so triggered by this she sent me a message cussing me out.

6) The private messaging system functions like your standard mailbox.

7) On a free account, you can message up to 5 people in a 24 hour period. The premium account has unlimited messaging, along with other features.

This is what the dashboard looks like.

8) All of these features can be accessed from the navigation bar, so this is a pointless change. In the previous iteration, the dashboard was a list of users currently or recently online. You could either scroll through the listed profiles or run a search. Now, the user has to perform an additional click to achieve the same result. That’s bad UI/UX design.

So, when we click on ‘search’ this screen loads.

9) These are the main search filters. I would rearrange these. Age range, ethnicity, and nationality aren’t deal-breakers. I’d be more interested in filtering for religiosity, whether they are open to moving, and whether they want to work after marriage.

10) The other search filters can be selected from this drop-down menu.

11) If you want to add a profile to your ‘favourites’ you can click on the heart symbol on a user’s profile summary. If you click on the heart symbol in the navigation menu you can see a list of people who have viewed your profile recently, who you have favorited, and who have favorited you.

Overall, the UI/UX is functional but clunky and old-fashioned. I hope they invest in improving it ASAP.

Profile Quality

Here’s where they start to drop the ball.

12) The profile summary has a blurred out image, the username, the user’s age, his/her location, and a short blurb about themselves. Think about it from a reader’s perspective. When someone sees your summary, you want to grab their attention so they click through to read your detailed profile. How can you manage that with no picture and a blurb that, more often than not, is dull and nondescript?

I get that the Secondwife.com can’t do much about users not knowing how to write a good marriage profile. However, making profile pictures private by default is a terrible idea. Someone who doesn’t want pictures visible on his/her profile can already refrain from uploading any (look at the screenshots above.) They can also wear niqab if they don’t want to show their face – there are several profiles like that.

Ok, so let’s say I do a search for profiles with the location ‘United Arab Emirates.’ It returns 25 results, 60% of them inactive. Here’s one of the inactive profiles.

13) I saw this picture before they made the change to private-by-default. I have my suspicions that it’s fake. I remember seeing a profile picture that I was 100% sure was fake because the picture used was from one of my Twitter followers. Sadly, now they’ve made all the profile photos private by default, users can’t even report such behavior immediately.

14) This is another red flag. The profile location is listed as Dubai but is logged in from the U.S.A. Azad told me that this is a security feature to protect people from scammers.

15) The profile is inactive.

16) It is also incomplete.

I don’t have accurate figures but in my two months of using the site, I estimate that 30-50% of users are inactive or have incomplete profiles. This is something Azad and his team needs to address ASAP through user retention initiatives.

I also noticed a large number of profiles of irreligious women – women who don’t pray all their prayers (it’s one of the profile descriptors) and who don’t wear hijab. Ok, I get that these women want to get married too but is secondwife.com really the place they should be looking? A – men who are seriously looking for second wives aren’t looking for part-time Muslims. B – it’s a disaster waiting to happen – polygyny is difficult enough as it is without adding an irreligious woman into the mix.

Which brings me to my next point. There are several women on the site who are NOT looking for polygyny. Here are three examples.

WTFluff?

I have my suspicions about several of the profiles that don’t come out and say it explicitly – young, never been married, profile reads as naive/immature. I doubt these women are on the site for polygyny.

One final point on the user profiles. The largest number of female users are in the United Kingdom. The number of users from other countries pales in comparison. This is another problem for people who are serious about polygyny – they are looking for something that makes logistical sense. If I have only 10 active users to select from in the UAE, what’s the point in paying for a premium account? Yes, I did do searches for users in nearby countries (GCC.) Again, it was a poor selection.

The combination of inactive accounts, incomplete profiles, terribly written profiles, a large percentage of irreligious women, and lack of selection really brings the overall experience down. However, I believe the experience will be much better for people in the U.K. just because there are so many more users from there.

Marketing

Azad has been doing a good job getting profiled in the media, with several TV appearances and print features. While he does a decent job fielding some tough questions he always looks on the back foot. He needs to pay for professional media training, come up with script answers to every conceivable question, and practice those answers over and over again until they become second nature.

Aside from press, their marketing is almost non-existent, which is a shame, though not for lack of trying. Azad says they can’t run ads because the available marketing channels reject them. Still, we live in the age of social media, and they are doing badly there as well.

The secondwife.com Facebook page shows 3 posts in September but before that, their last activity was in June. Audience engagement isn’t that great either and it’s no surprise – the majority of the posts are announcements about media appearances.

Twitter is even worse.

However, someone has been replying to @s in September so the account is active.

They have two Youtube channels – Secondwife.com and Practical Marriage Guide. Only the latter is active but the last video was uploaded a month ago.

Where is the blog?

Where are the success stories, testimonials, and case studies?

Overall, their online footprint needs a LOT of work. Azad told me they hired a full-time social media marketer so hopefully, they can turn things around here.

Final Verdict

As it stands right now, I believe the current iteration of this service is turning away many potential MALE signups. Until you have a healthy ecosystem and ratio of genders you’ll find a lot of women signing up, not seeing any suitors, getting discouraged and logging off, never to return.

It’s worth getting a premium account if you are in the U.K. but for users from other countries, I recommend waiting a while until the service improves.

My Recommendations

Here’s what I think SecondWife.com should do to 10X their business.

User Experience

There needs to be a MUCH greater value add in paying for a premium account. The only real benefit is being able to see public pictures and message more people. That’s not worth paying $20 a month. Not even close. Use your imaginations, I’m sure you can come up with something.

User inactivity is a problem. You need an effective onboarding process that keeps users coming back to the website.

And please, for goodness sake, add push and email notifications ASAP.

Marketing

I would seriously rethink your strategy of using mainstream media as your primary marketing channel. What percentage of your target audience is reading or watching those pieces? I know you get a boost in signups whenever you have a media appearance but what percentage of those are serious users, as opposed to just curious?

I know you have a hard time with online marketing because the site is controversial, but here’s the solution.

Two words – content marketing.

You need a blog that puts out regular articles to solve your target audience’s problems. Do case studies of secondwife.com success stories. Teach people how to write good marriage profiles and how to take a good profile photo. Show them effective ways to go about the spouse-hunting process. Talk about ways to finance a 2nd (or 3rd or 4th) family. And so on.

You also need to pitch guest posts to various Islamic websites and appear on Islamic podcasts and youtube channels.

This is where you need to spend your marketing budget – in creating high-quality content (articles, images, video) for your target audience. And if you are going to advertise, think of creative ways to do it. Why not advertise on an Islamic podcast or youtube channel? Or buy ad space on a popular Islamic website?

If I was you, I’d focus my efforts on blogging and creating youtube videos. Think of ways to incorporate the youtube videos in your blog posts. Or to use videos to drive viewers to articles in your blog. It’s all about creating synergy between your various content channels.

That’s the end of my review. Azad’s response follows. I have made minor edits to his answers to maintain flow.

Response by Azad Chaiwala

On UI/UX

The website was created at the end of 2014. We got off to a slow start but in mid-2015 our signups started to increase greatly. The website went through two major revamps since then and now we periodically try to make updates every few weeks.

The site was created by one man. Now we have a team of around 5 people working on it. Considering one person built the site it is fair to say he did well. But there are still significant updates we must make.

On Profile Quality

On our website it says our staff vets profiles for inappropriate content. This was a relatively easy task when we had a few thousand members but now we have 100,000+ and daily signups are more than what’s feasible to manually moderate. We now rely on users reporting profiles.

We have also created a bot that scans profiles for specific keywords such as ‘sex’, ‘money’, etc. and reports profiles containing them for moderation. This is the first version of the bot and it’s doing OK so far but we are improving it to scan messages as well.

We now don’t display user profiles which are less than 75% complete. If a profile is less than 75% complete they get a message asking them to update their profile or they won’t show up in search results. In the next update, we are going to prevent profiles less than 75% complete from viewing other profiles. Profile completeness will also require a minimum word count for the open-ended profile questions.

On Pictures set to Private by Default

Here, we took inspiration from PureMatrimony.com which is renowned for its decency. We want to avoid window shopping so profile images are automatically set to private. Everyone has the option to change their album to public if they want but we believe private-by-default is a better option.

On female users who are not interested in polygyny

There shouldn’t be anyone on the site that isn’t interested in polygyny. I will make this more clear on the homepage of the site in the future if it isn’t obvious enough already.

On Marketing

This is a huge problem for us. We have created radio, TV, and banner adverts but most marketing platforms refuse to accept us because of how controversial the site is. We even contacted the producers of polygamy shows like Sister Wives etc to see if we can sponsor them and they said no. They cannot be seen to be promoting polygamy. We aren’t even allowed to boost a post on Facebook! This is why we have been so aggressive with the media.

We just hired a social media manager last week and he has been very active on facebook and twitter for secondwife.com and polygamy.com. We have a blog that is coming soon as well.

We have been privately collecting success stories and we will publish them on the blog when that goes live. Just this week a male user from the US contacted me to say he has found a second wife using my service and I put him in contact with a journalist who is now interviewing him.

On their intentions and motivation

We genuinely believe in this service. It is not a get-rich-quick scheme. We have been self-funding this project since the end of 2014. We have a six-figure marketing budget that no one will touch because of the reasons outlined in my answers above. Our true reward is getting people married. Every time we get a success story it gives us a huge boost and we feel like we are making a good change in the world.

Subscription revenue is growing and more recently has been exceeding running costs. But to be honest, subscription revenue is about this business becoming self-sufficient. If we didn’t believe in the project we would have shut it down a long time ago. Fortunately, we are businessmen and have been very successful in other businesses, which allows us to pursue our passion for these sites. And we do genuinely believe they will be very successful. Money isn’t a problem.

Over to you, reader

What do you think of all this?

Are you interested in trying out SecondWife.com?

Leave a comment below and let me know.

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Look at what women do, not what they say. Any woman who is on a site called secondwife.com is open to the idea of becoming a second wife. If she states otherwise, it’s the equivalent of anti-slut defense because the Muslim community so heavily shames polygyny. She just needs some support to feel fully comfortable with it and she’s having a psychological conflict – but the fact that she’s on the site speaks volumes.

Azad does not need to make it any more clear, the site is called secondwife.com for God’s sake.

That site is horrible for women. Not because of polygyny which I am in full support of as a muslimah. But the men on there are secretive and creepy. Many just want an ‘halal mistress’. I think polygyny is good but too many muslim men want to act like little boys when it comes to taking a second wife. They are too ashamed to tell family and friends even though it is permissible in Islam and a lot of them cant really afford a second wife but just want a ‘side piece’. By the way I love your site. I think it will help boost the self esteem of muslim back to where it needs to be. Time for men to be men again.

Thanks for your comment. Are you sure every man on secondwife.com is looking for a side piece? Maybe there are many who are. At some point both parties need to be responsible for properly vetting all prospects, doing background checks, and making sure all negotiations and the marriage are above board.

Im sure there were a few good brothers on there but I would sign up and then not soon after delete the account because of the behavior I described. Most times it never went past intros because they would refuse to answer questions or speak to my wali. The few times it did I had men asking to keep me secret or trying to negotiate a price. We didn’t even get to proposal’s or talking with family and they are trying to negotiate prices. Just cheapening the whole process by avoiding talk of real issues that will affect the marriage.

How can you be an Alpha anything if you believe in a being that rains power over you at all times, knows what you will do before you do it and judges you on frivolous things? Aren’t you just a list of beta male cucks to your god?

There needs to be more information on who can/ can’t register on this site., currently I can’t find anything that stipulates this.

I registered on here as a brother from the other site I was on , advised me as I couldn’t find practising brothers- I don’t want to be a co-wife, but that should be my choice. He found his wife on here, she was clear from outset that she didn’t want to be a co wife. This brother’s divorce occurred, from the behest of his first wife and they are now happily married.

The comments about sisters shouldn’t going on here if they’re not prepared to be a second wife are double standards as I have seen loads of men on here who are divorced and looking for a new wife not a co-wife. So let’s get our facts straight, does it really matter who goes on here, as long as they are open, honest and genuinely trying to find a good spouse in a “halal” way?

The website’s positioning is that it’s only for people seeking polygynous marriages. Women who aren’t interested in polygyny have plenty of other marriage websites to choose from.

I agree with you it needs to be more clear who can or can’t register on the website. I also agree with you that men who aren’t interested in polygyny shouldn’t use the website.

This lack of clarity and poor user experience is why I don’t recommend anyone (men and women) use secondwife.com. Unless they live in the UK (where they have the largest user base.)

I wrote this article 3 years ago, and conveyed all my recommendations to the owner, Azad Chaiwala (quoted in the piece.) Today, the website still looks like crap, the user experience is still awful, and their marketing is virtually non-existent. So in 3 years, they’ve done nothing but make a few minor cosmetic changes.